From the first announcement of Google’s algorithm update this year, we knew that it was expected to eliminate low-quality content and, particularly, content farms. However, many of the sites that were lumped into this low-quality category did not agree with the classification, including popular IT discussion site DaniWeb.

Dani Horowitz, who runs the site, told us that her US traffic was cut in half as a result of the Panda Update. After looking closely at the situation, she believes that her site was hit because so many other sites syndicate her site’s content. In other words, these sites were hit because they were classified as content farms, but DaniWeb felt the impact as well since its backlinks lost value from these sites.

Fortunately, Horowitz is seeing some improvements to her site. She said she went into complete SEO and programmer mode which involved updating the entire url structure, removing tag clouds, using noindex and nofollow meta tags, making social buttons more obvious, and more. Although DaniWeb is not back to the point it was prior to Panda’s roll out, it is continuing to see positive progress.